Welcome to the official blog of Four Way Books, a nonprofit literary press publishing poetry and short fiction. On this blog you'll find up-to-the-minute news, reviews, and event information for our authors and books. You can also visit our website, www.fourwaybooks.com for information on how to submit, how to contact us, and to purchase Four Way Books titles.

"...the mood of Brooklyn is reflected in the rest of the country. It’s a time of growth. It’s as if the soil is being turned and, for good and bad, there is inevitable change. I live in a part of Brooklyn where it feels like the residents have a lot though if you stop long enough to talk to anyone at length, you’ll realize their human struggle is like everyone else’s and it is the same American dream that drove them to move here."

Presented by Public Poetry at Houston Public Library - Central (Jesse H. Jones)

Public Poetry exists to bring the public and the poetry community together for a lively, not-to-be-missed, free monthly series with some of Houston’s very best poets. This spring series is a partnership between Public Poetry and Houston Public Library.

Rick Moody's latest book is The Four Fingers of Death. His first novel,Garden State, won the 1991 Editor's Choice Award from the Pushcart Press.His other books include Demonology, The Ice Storm, The Ring of BrightestAngels Around Heaven, The Diviners and Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas.

Maxine Hong Kingston's latest book is I Love A Broad Margin to My Life. Shewon the National Book Award for her novel China Men. Her other books includeThe Fifth Book of Peace, To Be the Poet, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book,Through The Black Curtain and The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood amongGhosts.

Monica Youn's latest book of poems is called Ignatz. Her first book of poemswas called Barter. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Cue: A Journal ofProse Poetry and elsewhere.

Regina Lynnwas the award-winning Sex Drive columnist at Wired.com and theTuesday "Sex in the News" guest on Playboy Radio: Afternoon Advice withTiffany Granath. She is the author of Sexier Sex: Lessons from the Brave NewSexual Frontier and The Sexual Revolution 2.0.

About Writers With Drinks:

Writers With Drinks has won "Best Literary Night" from the SF Bay Guardianreaders' poll six years in a row and was named "Best Literary Drinking" bythe SF Weekly. The spoken word "variety show" mixes genres to raise moneyfor local worthy causes. The award-winning show includes poetry, stand-upcomedy, science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, literary fiction,erotica, memoir, zines and blogs in a freewheeling format.

Des Moines Area Community College’s (DMACC’s) ninth annual Celebration of the Literary Arts will be held April 4-6 with classroom visits to all six DMACC campuses by area writers and literary instructors.

Two poets and two prose writers will read from their works on the DMACC Ankeny Campus in the Bldg. #5 Student Center from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Wed., Apr. 6: The four include: C. Dale Young, Antonya Nelson, Denise Duhamel, and Steven Schwartz.

Death or violence occurs in nearly every poem in Prufer's latest, enabling and sometimes forcing the poet to locate what is beautiful in what is otherwise tragic. "You were burning so thoughtfully in the field," he writes in "The Failure of Parents to Survive Their Children," "like a horse who,/ running from a flaming barn…sets the grass afire/ as he passes through it." Prufer proves himself a master at maintaining an emotional distance from his images--"he is far away, and, anyway, this is only a dead girl"--that renders them as stark as they are gorgeous. Though Prufer, on rare occasions, can be so clinical with an image that it feels like little more than "a picture in a book," the timing and precision of his lineation and enjambment keep each of the book's four-poem sequences operating at a pitch that is always crisp. By peppering traditional and formal verse throughout--rhymed sonnets, artes poeticae, love poems, an elegy--Prufer attempts to locate a form and a place for violence within the history of poetry, the effect of which is most moving when this violence is woven into a strand that is personal, political, and so close one feels one can touch it. (Apr.)

"Most of the poems in Young's articulate and honest third collection say something to, and about, the facts of his life: his Catholic and Latino heritage, his years spent in Boston, his residence in San Francisco, his training as a physician, and his self-discovery as a gay man. 'Dear God, what was it you placed in the heart,' he asks, 'not of necessity, but because it is the center/ of all moral forces and impulses?'...

Monday, March 21, 2011

Poet Tina Chang will deliver a talk on behalf of The Annual Christina Porter Art and Poetry in the Schools Lecture, on Thursday, March 24 at 12:30 PM in Higgins Hall Auditorium at 61 St. James Place in Brooklyn. She is the author of two books and her work has been featured in numerous publications. Chang is the current (2010) poet laureate of Brooklyn. Her new collection of poetry, Of Gods and Strangers, is forthcoming this year from Four Way Books.

Friday, March 18, 2011

On Torn: "With the best of poets, we gorge upon the texture of words and sonic registers, all at play here, even in the most horrifying of circumstances. This dissonance reminds us of paradoxical nature of art—our ability to make sense of and even to render with beauty that moments that can be the most traumatizing."

Monday, March 14, 2011

"Wherever you may be, if you are capable of memory there, can you fetch that dawn on Freeze-to-Death Island, the sleet slamming at our faces like some archaic dentist’s tool? A flock of geese drops in among the decoys, and without so much as a word between us, we let them paddle around unharmed on the riddled surface. There’s something so elegant about the birds that we just can’t fire on them. At length you rise from behind the rock we use for cover to shout, unaccountably, “Off to Cuba, baby ducks!” You pronounce it Cuber, like JFK. October of ‘62. The geese flush in a tumult of sound.

Monday, March 7, 2011

Maya Asher, Teresa Dawn Driver and Joni Wallace

When: Wed., March 23, 7:30 p.m.

As part Edge 32: A Reading Series of Emerging and Younger Writers, Casa Libre presents Maya Asher, Teresa Dawn Driver and Joni Wallace reading their work at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 23. $5 suggested donation. Call or visit casalibre.org for more information.

Peter Brown is senior editor at Salamander. His short story collection A Bright Soothing Noise received the 2010 Katherine Anne Porter Prize. His translations have received support from the PEN American Center and the French Embassy. His stories have appeared in Harvard Review, Mississippi Review, and Post Road.

Valerie Duff, the poetry editor for Salamander, has received St. Botolph and Massachusetts Cultural Council grants for her poetry. Her first book, To the New World, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2010. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Agni, and elsewhere.

Daniel Tobin is the author of five books of poems, most recently Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010). Among his awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He is Interim Dean of the School of the Arts at Emerson College.

Friday, March 4, 2011

Check out Lambda Literary's interview with C. Dale Young, "We Are Complex Things," as he talks about his new book, Torn (Four Way Books, 2011).

"I am endlessly fascinated by the fact the human animal is capable of incredible tenderness and care while in the next moment it is capable of unthinkable brutality. I see this over and over. And I guess I imagine God must also be that way to have created us in His image, a fact theologians typically want to avoid. We are complex things. God is complex. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Nothing."

About Me

Publishing 6-8 books a year.
Reading Series: Catch us at Readings on the Bowery where we feature our own authors as well as writers from around the country.
We are proud recipients of grants from
New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses through their re-grant program. We are also grateful to the private foundations and many individuals who support our programs.
AVAILABLE TO THE TRADE exclusively through
The University Press of New England (UPNE).
Use this link or order Toll-Free:1-800-421-1561.